In the early
1960s, historian of science Thomas Kuhn introduced the
concept of a paradigm to describe a conceptual model
or set of assumptions about reality. A paradigm, he
suggested, allows scientists to interpret data, elaborate
theories and solve problems. It can be as all-encompassing
as Newtonian physics, or as specific as the notion that
life exists only on earth. The trouble, he said, is that
paradigms are resistant to change. They are like closed
systems in which all new data tend to confirm what is
already known. As a result, the history of science is
punctuated by violent upheavals in which one paradigm
overthrows another.

Many scientists feel that we are on
the cusp of such a revolution today. There is a growing
recognition that the old mechanistic paradigm passed down
from the Enlightenment does not work very well in
addressing the pressing questions of modern science. This
is reflected in the emergence of chaos, complexity and
other radically interdisciplinary "new"
sciences.

Geobiologist Elisabet Sahtouris belongs to a
handful of innovative scientists who are rethinking the
classical model and advancing fresh new perspectives. She
believes the task of modern science is to shift "from
mechanics to organics" and embrace a more holistic,
systems-based approach.

Sahtouris is the author of
EarthDance:
Living Systems in Evolution, Biology
Revisioned (co-authored with Willis Harman) and A
Walk Through Time (co-authored with Brian Swimme). She
is a consultant expert on indigenous peoples for the United
Nations, a Findhorn fellow, and serves on the advisory
board of the Institute for Sustainable Development and
Alternative Futures.

The following conversation took
place in Santa Barbara, California, in August 1996.

Scott London: Let's begin at the
beginning. How did you first develop an interest in
science?

Elisabet Sahtouris: I studied art
because my parents thought that science was a boy's
subject. So I had a degree in fine arts before I went into
science. Then I did get my Ph.D and did a post-doc at the
Museum of Natural History in New York, just about the time
that Jim Lovelock's first article on the Gaia hypothesis
came out. I was doing comparative brain research in
evolution. But my big questions -- Who are we humans? Where
do we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we
headed? -- remained unanswered. I got very discouraged with
science for not answering those big problems. Nobody seemed
to want to take the global view, or the universal view,
about humanity as a species.

London: When did
you begin to realize that traditional science wasn't
adequate to answer some of these great questions?

Sahtouris: I think it was during my postdoctoral
fellowship, when I was in Manhattan in New York City and
saw so many social problems -- people who were becoming
homeless, being evicted, breathing foul air. I caused some
unrest at the Museum of Natural History because they had
paid a lot of money to do a very expensive pollution
exhibit. This was around 1969. At the same time, the museum
was belching black smoke all over northern Manhattan so
women couldn't hang their laundry out in the vicinity. I
pointed out the contradiction between their pollution
exhibit and what they were doing themselves. So there were
many little lessons in seeing that science has such
blinders on that it does not relate itself to the larger
society.

A few years later I had the opportunity to sit
with professors at MIT to discuss how this society works
and alternately being in a prison discussing the same
issues with black inmates. It was very obvious to me that
the black inmates understood the structure and function of
this society much better than the scientists from MIT who
whenever they did have an insight about how society works
wanted to publish it as a new theory on let's say the
relationship between public education and industry [laughs]
and it would be something that was common knowledge to
people who had grown up in the streets.

So I began to
think, how can science answer the big questions when it
really doesn't pay any attention to what is happening in
the world. I decided that it was much more important to me
to worry about the transition for humanity with some things
breaking down while new alternatives are being developed
than to stay in a laboratory doing what had come to seem
like trivial research to me.

When I went to Greece a
few years after that, I decided I would write novels to
explain the human condition to myself. I had become friends
with Henry Miller. I came to understand why Henry said he
hated the straight line. What he was talking about really
was something artificial, geometric, abstract, not part of
the messy, organic world. But when I got to the islands in
Greece and was living there in the woods and on the water
with the fishermen, the same old questions came back to me.
I wanted to know who we were within this natural context. I
wanted a scientific explanation that was better than the
ones I was taught. So I set myself the task of trying to
describe the evolution of the earth within the context of a
living, self-creating cosmos, and then look at human
history within that context -- which I do in kind of a
quick and dirty way, but I wanted to see rapidly how people
through the ages have seen themselves in relation to this
larger living system we depend on.

London: Your
book revolves around the Gaia hypothesis which was
developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. How would
you characterize this theory?

Elisabet
Sahtouris: Jim Lovelock is an atmospheric scientist
from England. He proposed that the earth was a living,
self-organizing entity, and called it Gaia after the Greek
name of the original goddess of creation who became the
earth itself.

I differ a little bit from Lovelock and
Margulis in how I talk about Gaia because I never call it
either a hypothesis (which is what they first called it) or
a theory. To me it is a conceptualization of the earth as
alive, to replace our conceptualization of the earth as an
array of mechanisms. It's part of the transition in general
from a mechanical worldview to an organic worldview, to see
the world as alive. For me it's alive by definition.

I
use the definition of life which was proposed by two
biologists from South America, Maturana and Varela, which
goes by the name of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis
is a Greek word, of course, meaning literally
"self-creation." The definition goes: A living
entity is any entity that constantly creates itself. This
really distinguishes it from a mechanism, because a machine
is not constantly creating itself. In fact, if it changes
itself at all it's probably broken and you would rather it
didn't do that; while a living thing is always changing, or
it's dead.

So, it's a conceptualization, not a
hypothesis or a theory. Within that conceptualization, that
scientific framework, you would propose hypotheses or make
theories about how it functions.

London: Today
the Gaia theory or hypothesis is bandied around a lot as a
nice "metaphor," but is it taken seriously by the
scientific community?

Sahtouris: One of the
things that happened was that people who get identified as
"new age" (and that means a lot of things) got
very excited about the Gaia hypothesis of Jim Lovelock,
because intuitively everyone knows that nature is alive,
that the earth is alive. In fact, our western industrial
culture is the only one in history that has not
known that the earth is alive.

When people say it's
"just a metaphor," we really have to look at that
because all science is metaphor. When you say that nature
is an array of mechanisms, that's absolutely as
metaphorical as saying it's a living entity. There is no
way of talking about anything new without invoking
metaphors. All of science is based on metaphor. If you talk
about an atom as a little solar system with planets around
it, or as whirlpools of energy, in the more recent
descriptions, these are all metaphors. Metaphor simply
means that you take something that is familiar to you and
use it as a pictograph or an image of what you are trying
to describe that you don't yet understand well.

London: Why is it so difficult for us westerners
to understand the earth as a living system?

Sahtouris: It goes back to the Cartesian
worldview, I think, in which Descartes proposed that God
was a great engineer and his creations were mechanisms.
That meant that all nature was an array of mechanisms
created by God, the engineer, who then put a piece of his
God-mind into his favorite robot -- man -- so that he, too,
could create machinery. Now, whether you like it or not,
that was a rather complete worldview that accounted for
everything.

When the scientists decided that they
didn't need God in their worldview, they eliminated God
from their Cartesian worldview but kept the idea of an
array of mechanisms. Now how do you explain the origin of
mechanisms without a creator? By definition, a machine
cannot exist without a creator. If they are there and
couldn't have been assembled on purpose by an intentional
creator, the only alternative is to say they came together
by accident. So you got these bizarre theories that
literally say that if enough parts of a Boeing 747 blow
around in a whirlwind in a junkyard eventually one will
assemble itself. This is going to appear to us as perhaps
the most bizarre and perhaps harebrained concepts of how
things work that has ever been proposed in the history of
the world. And I think it will be seen that way in the very
near future, because it is fundamentally an illogical point
of view. The problem was that they thought you had to
choose between God, the purposeful inventor, and accident.
We had no theory of self- creation as a perfectly natural,
biological, universal event. Now we do, so we don't have to
invoke either hypothesis.

London: There is an
interesting part of your book Gaia where you talk
about the scientific, mechanistic worldview as being,
perhaps, the product of an ancient debate between the Greek
philosophers. You had, on the one hand, people like Plato,
Aristotle, and Pythagoras who thought of reason as
something that stood apart from the world as we experience
it. Reason was supposed to be transcendent. On the other
hand, there were philosophers like Heraclitus and
Anaximander who had a more organic worldview and saw the
cosmos as being alive. I suppose we don't need to speculate
about who won the argument.

Sahtouris: [Laughs]
That's right. My favorite of those organic philosophers was
Anaximander. We have only one sentence surviving of his
writings, the rest is hearsay via his students. But that
one sentence, in my translation from Greek, says:
"Everything that forms in nature incurs a debt which
it must repay by dissolving so that other things may
form." That is a beautiful theory of evolution through
recycling in a single sentence. And it shows you that the
concept was alive and well in ancient times. Then the
westerners -- the Platonists and so forth -- focused on
logic and mathematics, which gets you straight into
mechanism, as their models of nature.

London:
Some anthropologists and historians are now reconsidering
some of the early evidence from as far back as the
Paleolithic age and discovering that many cultures had a
more holistic worldview back then.

Sahtouris:
Yes. In fact, holism was the natural way to be for all of
the ancient and indigenous people, including those who
survive to this day. It's our western obsession with taking
the world apart, putting it in boxes, to separate science
from politics, from religion, from the arts, for instance.
That was not the case in other cultures. It helped them
therefore to see things holistically simply because they
weren't taking things apart. They, in fact, see other
dimensions which we relegate into the realm of religion as
part of ordinary reality. They are not obsessed with
drawing lines between fact and fiction.

That reminds me
of a conversation I had with David Abram about his
experiences in Indonesia working with medicine people
there. David had got a grant to go as a sleight-of-hand
magician on the grounds that this talent and practice of
his would help him to get into the world of medicine people
there. In fact, it did work. He was saying that all
medicine people know some sleight-of-hand. So I was
pressing him, where was the line between sleight-of-hand
magic and reality in their world. And David kept saying to
me, there is no line between magic and reality. Nature is
profoundly magical at heart. It took me a long time to
really grasp and understand what he meant by that. It is
only though my years of living with indigenous people in
various places that I can understand that myself.

London: Speaking of native cultures, you've added
a chapter called "The Indigenous Way" in the
newly expanded edition of your book. Why add this chapter?

Sahtouris: When I finished the first version of
the book, it concluded that if humans don't start behaving
like a living system within the larger human system we call
nature or the planet or the cosmos, then we are going to go
extinct in short order. Once having decided that our task
was to live like a living system within a living system, it
became obvious to me that indigenous people know more about
that than our western culture does. Our western culture has
made a point of separating itself from the rest of nature,
looking at it (we think at least) objectively, and
controlling it.

In fact, a Tewa indian friend of mine,
Dr. Greg Cajete, who has written a book called Look to
the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, said
to me: "The difference between the way the red man
does science and the way the white man does science is
interesting. The white man isolates a piece of nature and
takes it into the laboratory to study it because he wants
to control it. The red man goes into nature because his
purpose is to integrate with it." That's a very
fundamental difference between our culture and other
cultures, that our goal is to use nature and transform it
to human ends -- which is control. Theirs is to live within
it harmoniously, recognizing that you are utterly dependent
on it just like any cell or organ in your body is totally
dependent on the rest of your body.

London:
There seems to be a great hunger for tribal wisdom today.
It's reflected on the bestseller lists with books like
Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under. There
seems to be an understanding at some level that indigenous
cultures have something that we have lost.

Sahtouris: Yes. I think the ecology movement led
us into it because it made us more aware of nature and how
we had walled ourselves off from it as much as possible in
our urban environments. Once you begin to develop those
intuitive feelings of profound respect for nature, of love
for nature, I think everyone comes to the conclusion that
maybe we should go and look at indigenous cultures that
haven't separated themselves from it the way we have for
that wisdom.

I use the Hopi story a lot in teaching in
which the great spirit father and the earth mother give two
different assignments to their children -- the red brother
and the white brother. They tell the white brother to go
abroad and write things and make inventions. They tell the
red brother to stay at home and keep the land in sacred
trust through ceremony. Then one day when the white brother
comes back, they say he should share his inventions with
the red brother listening to the wisdom that the red
brother has accumulated. If they do that, then together
they can create a better world. But if the white brother's
ego grows so great in the course of making his inventions
that he can no longer hear the wisdom of the red brother,
then all is lost and this world will end as we know it.

I like that as a teaching story because it says that
technology is a good thing provided it's done in the
context of wisdom about the natural living systems we're
imbedded in and depend on. ... Nowadays we call that
appropriate technology. That is exactly what we need to
look at. How can we develop our technology in ways that are
harmless to nature and maybe even supports it, which is a
possibility.

London: In your book you also talk
about the Kogi indians. They have some similarities with
the Hopi people.

Sahtouris: Yes. The Kogi are
known to many people through Alan Ereira's documentary
called Message from the Heart of the World: The Elder
Brother Speaks. They talk about Aluna as being the
creatrix of the world and say that before she created the
world, she lived through all possible worlds through great
mental anguish. Therefore she is called memory and
possibility, which I think is just a beautiful phrase. She
created nine worlds in the Kogi creation story, and in the
ninth one she put people, including an older brother and a
younger brother. So this is very similar to the red brother
and the white brother of the Hopi story. Younger brother
was always bugging older brother and so eventually Aluna
sent him far, far across the sea where he couldn't be so
bothersome. The Kogi say that 500 years ago he found his
way back across the ocean and he is still being destructive
and annoying, and if he doesn't stop chopping up the liver
of the mother and cutting out her heart, he will destroy
the world as we know it. They are of course referring to
the mining and the deforestation which they can see in the
Amazon at the foot of their great vast mountain in
Colombia.

London: They lived quite insulated
from civilization for some 500 years, then?

Sahtouris: Very much so. According to the
documentary, they are the last survivors of the
pre-Columbian cultures. But that is not, in fact, true. I
went to visit a village that has never been visited by
anyone, even an archeologist, in all this time. I had the
opportunity when some of them walked back to Cuzco to show
them this Kogi film. Most of them fell asleep because they
had never sat on couches before watching a video. I was
very aware as I watched it with them and heard them make
comments about how the Kogi language seemed similar to
their Runa (or, as the Spanish called it, Quechua language)
that they too were survivors of pre-Columbian culture.

London: What happened when you journeyed over the
mountain to their village?

Sahtouris: Well, a
few of them had walked from their town over the mountain
pass at 5,000 meters in the snow and made a bee-line for
Cuzco, which doesn't take them much longer than it takes a
40-ton Volvo truck to do it on the winding, hairpin-turn
roads. So they came in with their rubber tire sandals
(rubber tire sandals are everywhere now in the Andes
because of these 40-ton Volvo trucks crossing it whose
tires blow out) and carrying sacks of potatoes to feed
themselves in the city because they don't have any money.
They met with some of my musician friends there who took
them in and let them stay in their homes and who cooked for
them. As we fed them and cared for them they asked us if we
wouldn't please come to visit because no one had ever done
so. So we had the introduction of friends in the city who
had played music with some of the urbanized native people.

Everything was totally friendly; they were just
overwhelmed with joy that we actually made the effort to
come to their village and go through a three-day
celebration with them. I had the opportunity to cook a lama
stew over an open fire. Mostly they live on their wonderful
potatoes. Their agricultural practices are so sound that if
they plant a field one year they then give it a six year
rest before they plant that one again. There is a lot of
water there at the snow line in the Andes. And things are
very green. The soil is jet-black. And you really can live
on the different colors and varieties of potatoes that they
grow there. [The article,
"Journey to
Hapu," gives a complete account of this visit.]

London: What have you learned from
traveling back and forth between our society and indigenous
cultures?

Sahtouris: One of the interesting
things about that difference I could illustrate by talking
about a friend named Sarah James who is a gwich'in indian
in the northernmost town in Alaska. Sarah was down at the
earth conference in Rio in 1992, beating her great big
caribou- skin drum and talking about welcoming people by
flapping the flaps of her skin-hut. She talked about how
very wealthy her culture was, how rich it was, before the
white man came. That culture makes literally everything
from caribou. Besides eating caribou, they make their
boats, their huts, their drums, their musical instrument,
their kitchen utensils from the skin and flesh and bones of
the caribou. When the white man came he saw these people
and said, "These poor people living in forty degrees
below zero with virtually nothing, we've got to do
something for them and bring them into the modern
world." Sarah says, "They called us
savages," and as she beats her drum she says
"Well, let's keep Alaska savage!" She was
expressing the fact that their self-perception was one of
great wealth. She said, "We had warm houses and
clothing, we had plenty of food, we had time for our
families and our culture, we had songs and stories and a
beautiful religion, and we were a happy people. Then we
were defined as being primitive, backward, poor. Today we
are truly poor because we've been impoverished by the
things the white man brought to us" -- from illnesses
to inappropriate housing to tinned foods to lack of
opportunity to alcohol and other drugs. These are the
things that impoverish native people who were once
self-sufficient.

In the Northwest we often hear about
the potlatch ceremony of the indians. This was a ceremony
designed to give away possessions when they accumulated on
you. If you didn't have enough people to share them with
the culture would help you to share them with others
through this giveaway ceremony. That is because there is a
completely opposite perception of material wealth in those
cultures. These cultures often moved from place to place
and people didn't want to have to carry lots of things, and
things interfered -- they got in the way. So their idea of
wealth had to do with very few material possessions. The
wealth was spiritual, artistic. It had to do with the
richness of the culture in other ways than the material,
although they did do some paintings and carvings and things
like that -- it's not that they lacked graphic arts. That
is a very different perception of materiality, and it's one
that we would do very well to learn.

I did my personal
potlatch over twenty years ago when I moved to Greece and
undid a large house full of possessions. I vowed then that
I would never do it again, that I would strip myself down
to what would fit in one or two cubic meters of space every
few years, so that I could focus on the other kinds of
wealth in my life.

London: Have you succeeded?

Sahtouris: It's worked very well, although it's
hard not to accumulate things. You do have to do constant
giveaways. I haven't solved the paper-glut problem. I
thought computers were supposed to do that [laughs], but
they don't seem to. I try to do that because I'm much
happier with fewer things. In Peru, I enjoy living in one
room with much fewer possession than I would have in this
culture.

London: You mentioned the arrival of
the white man in Alaska. The new global village we live in
has brought a great deal of suffering to native peoples.

Sahtouris: Without a doubt. We have extinguished
half the languages that were spoken on the earth already,
and we are rapidly extinguishing the ones that remain.
People fail to recognize that the cultural treasures of all
these different indigenous nations and smaller groups are
being lost at a much higher cost than when you lose a
pyramid or a temple. The wisdom and the outlook, the
worldview, of these diverse cultures is so important. The
number one lesson of nature is diversity. Nature doesn't
like monocultures. The tragedy of our agriculture is
monoculture. The tragedy of our culture is that we think we
want to clone ourselves, monoculture ourselves, and we
don't respect the various ethnic groups that we have
available to ourselves in this country, for example. If you
want to plan the future of the world, invite people of
every possible hue and geographic location to your meeting
that you possibly can, because the discussion will be much,
much richer than if you are all white, middle class people
from North America. It's just absolutely essential for us
to share the creative ideas of people who speak different
languages and therefore see the world differently.

London: I would like to return to some of the
ideas in your books. You make the rather startling
assertion that we have descended from bacteria. Is that
true?

Sahtouris: Well, we are either their
descendants or their construction [laughs]. Lewis Thomas,
who wrote Lives of a Cell and other wonderful books
of essays, once proposed that we are giant taxis that
bacteria built to get themselves around in safely. It is
true that each one of our cells is a collective of ancient
formerly living bacterial types. Lynn Margulis has traced
most of this story of cooperation of the cells that we are
made of, which are nucleated cells. In the world two
billion years ago there were only bacteria. The shift from
a very exploitative, destructive lifestyle to this
lifestyle of cooperation among bacteria is a wonderful
parallel to what is going on in the human world today.

I wrote an article on this subject in In Context
magazine a few years ago. The bacteria I call the bubblers,
the blue- greens, and the breathers (it's easier to
remember them by these names than as the respirers and the
fermenters and the photosynthesizers) were really at war
with each other in many ways. They were exploiting each
other. The higher energy ones would eat out the insides of
the slower, sluggish bubblers because they had basically
eaten up the food supply. It was these bloated bags of
bubblers which turned eventually into cooperate, communal
ventures in which each of the bacterial types gave some of
its DNA up to what I call the central library (nowadays I
guess it would be called a hard disk) where you could store
information and then live cooperatively with the division
of labor among the different kinds of bacteria. The
invention of that community, that kind of cell, was the
only time that a new form of cell was formed in the
evolution of life of the earth -- I say of the
earth, and not on the earth, because the whole
planet is alive.

So what are we? If we are communities
of bacteria that found a better lifestyle by joining forces
with each other, then perhaps we are, as Lewis Thomas says,
giant taxis for them to get around safely in.

London: We were discussing the Gaia hypothesis
and the idea of metaphors in science. One of the enduring
metaphors of our scientific worldview has been Darwin's
principles of natural selection and survival of the
fittest. Darwinism has had a monumental impact on the way
we think about evolution and our place in nature. Yet you
believe we need to reassess Darwin's theories.

Sahtouris: Yes, I think Darwin's theory was good
for its time, but remember that its time was within a
mechanical worldview framework. To me Darwin's theory is a
very mechanical one in which you have "accidents"
occur (remember, we talked earlier about explaining a
natural world of machinery by accidental development - so
that notion was around). Then the "accidental"
variations in the genetic material is shaped by the
environment, which Darwin saw as a kind of template. If the
cogs of these accidents fit into the wheels of the
environment, then it would survive and the machine would
run on; and if it didn't then it would die out, it would be
inappropriate.

It occurred to me that life seemed to be
much too intelligent to proceed in its evolution by
accident. I kind of stuck my neck out ten years ago by
saying that. I thought that probably genetic errors were
repaired. Arthur Koestler had some similar ideas, I
believe, he was one of my sources for these ideas.

Now
the geneticists are becoming aware of this at a microscopic
level. We can look at what is happening with the
relationship of proteins and genes and cell membranes and
all that, and it looks very much as if life does not
proceed by accident but by design. And, as I said in my
book, the nucleus is really a giant library of genes
accumulated throughout evolution which can be drawn on
under stress. Creatures such as sharks or cockroaches are
very well-adapted and don't need to change (I call them
bicycles in a jet-age because they still function very well
although other species have gone on with totally different
paths of evolution). In other words, life changes itself
only when it needs to. It knows how to conserve what works
well and change what doesn't work well. That is why you get
very uneven evolution, not as in Darwinian theory which
would predict a very even rate of accident and even rate of
evolution for all species. We certainly know that that is
not true and no geneticist today would uphold the ideas of
Darwin completely.

London: There are movements
in science that are now beginning to question some of the
fundamental assumptions. Chaos theory comes to mind. Have
you been following the emergence of the "new
sciences"?

Sahtouris: Yes, I have. I think
it's all part of our shift, as I call it, from mechanics to
organics. It's well along for many, many scientists.
Certainly all the ones at the leading edge are aware that
we are talking about living nature and that what we want to
understand are the dynamics of living systems rather than
the structure and function of mechanism. So our mathematics
are becoming much more creative with people like Ralph
Abraham doing dynamics theory and doing it ways that can be
understood by ordinary people; and all of the repercussions
of chaos theory which is about self-organizing living
systems.

From my point of view, the concept of living
systems should be the overarching concept for all of our
educational institutions. In other words, we should be
teaching the politics of living systems, the economics of
living systems, the science of living systems. All of these
things would be united by that central concept. This is
what would help us as humans to form healthy living
systems.

I used to think that the mechanical world view
had imposed on us mechanical structures and that our
societies are really built like machines. But the fact is
that you can't turn living things into machinery. You can
try to force them to behave like machinery but they will
not be machinery. That is exactly why our economists can't
predict anymore and our politics is falling apart. We don't
understand them as unhealthy living systems. We're trying
to fix them like machines. It's very different to
cure a person and to fix a machine.

London: What
are some of the social and political ramifications of this
shift from mechanics to organics?

Sahtouris: I
devised a little model for children to show why the
economics we do in the world today are not appropriate for
living systems. I often refer people back to our own bodies
which are a perfectly good example of a living system. All
living systems obey the same principles. They have some
fundamental things in common in their organization and
function.

Now if you were going to do world politics in
your body, it would look something like this: You have raw
material blood cells coming up in the marrow of bones
throughout the body, and they are swept up to these
northern industrial organs -- the heart-lung system --
where the blood is purified and oxygen is added and you now
have a useful product. So the heart distribution center
announces that the body price for blood today is so much,
who wants? And the blood is shipped off to those organs
that can afford it, and you chuck the rest out as surplus.
You have to ask, is this a viable economics for a living
system? You can see that it would kill the body to do
economics in that way because some of the parts of the body
that couldn't afford the blood (which now might be bottled
until the price goes up) would now be starving and dying
off. This is exactly what you see, of course, in the human
world. We exploit some parts of humanity to the benefit of
other parts. That cannot work in a living system. If your
body decided to value the heart over the liver, or tried to
turn the heart into a liver or something like that (which
is the kind of crazy things we do as humans) it just
couldn't function. It requires diversity. It requires that
every cell look out for its own interest as well as for the
communal interests of its tissue, its organ, and the whole
body. No one in nature asks anyone to make a decision
between personal interest or communal interest. You don't
decide whether to be on the left or the right, whether to
be a conservative or a radical. You have to have both in
nature. It is the source of all creativity -- this tension
between the individual and the collective, the part and the
whole. It is the fact that their interests are somewhat at
odds that fires the creativity toward solutions. And then
again there is always another imbalance in the system that
has to be resolved. This is the great driving force of all
creativity. We are never going to be able to reach
perfection, and we are never going to be in total chaos. We
are always going to operate between those two. We have to
recognize the value of both sides. Capitalism is inherently
no more viable than the communism that was practiced in the
Soviet Union and some other places. One asked the
individual to sacrifice himself to the whole, and the other
asks the individual to sacrifice the whole to himself,
which isn't viable either.

So we are going to find a
lot of chaos in this country as we begin to regroup, begin
to understand living systems better, and begin to obey the
principles of living systems as we develop an alternative
society for the future.

London: You once said
that America needs its own perestroika, like that of
the old Soviet Union. What did you mean by that?

Sahtouris: Yes, I think we have to become aware
that we need a real overhaul of our system. For one
thing, it is not a democratic system, as was shown in a
very recent poll, done by both the Democrats and the
Republicans. It showed that 76 percent of the American
people do not have faith in their government and in fact
think it's up to no good. That is revolution proportions.
It's unprecedented in history.

Most people don't know
that our Constitution was written so that there would be no
personal income tax and so that only Congress could coin
money -- this right was given away by Congress in, I
believe, 1913 so that private banks are issuing money now,
even if the press, the Xerox machine, is in the hands of
the government.

There are a lot of things that have
been eroded since our Constitution was written. We are all
duped by television sets and with material playthings, not
recognizing that we don't live in a democracy any more, and
not taking the citizenship responsibility to do something
about it, to complain about it, to say, "I don't want
to play monopoly, I want to play some game that's
fairer." We have a money system that is designed to
funnel the wealth from the poor to the rich, and we are
sitting down and taking it. Jacques Jaikaran wrote a very
good book about this called Debt Virus: A Compelling
Solution to the World's Debt Problems. The information
is available, but I think people have very little time to
look at the larger picture, to say, Things are falling
apart in the world and we're all the players in the game --
why are we playing this game? Is this the one we want to
play? Or do we want to play a healthier one?

London: How do you keep your spirits up
considering the enormous ecological, social, and political
problems that confront us today?

Sahtouris: I
try to remain optimistic in the face of terrible
statistics. The ozone hole is growing by leaps and bounds.
Some say that by the year 2012 there won't be any ozone at
the current rate of destruction -- without adding to the
current problem. And we all know about the polluted oceans
and the dying forests and the poisoned rivers and air and
soil and so forth, the increase in desert land when we
really need more agricultural land. These are all terrible
statistics, but what do we do about them?

There is no
time in the future at which we have to turn things around.
Things are already turning around in the sense that a lot
of alternative ways of living have been developed around
the world, whether people are creating their own money
systems, or developing communal agriculture, or organic
agriculture, alternative education systems. These are all
the new forms of the future.

I like to use the metaphor
of the butterfly. In metamorphosis, within the body of the
caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal
discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the
caterpillar. They aren't recognized by the immune system so
the caterpillar's immune system wipes them out as they pop
up. It isn't until they begin to link forces and join up
with each other that they get stronger and are able to
resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune
system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the
body of the butterfly.

I think that is a beautiful
metaphor for what is happening in our times. The old body
is going into meltdown while the new one develops. It isn't
that you end one thing and then start another. So everybody
engaged in recycling, in alternative projects, in communal
living, in developing healthier systems for themselves and
each other is engaged in building the new world while the
old one collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. There is no
way around that.

We must, for example, shift to organic
agriculture. There is so much unemployment in the world
that it's very feasible. It can now be done with computers
on the farms, with culture coming in, and with farm
sitters, as in Denmark that permit the farmer to go to the
city for a while. There are many ways to do it. Indigenous
cultures show us that it can be done much more simply, much
more efficiently. You've got John Jevins here in California
doing his biointensive agriculture. He is already up to 4
to 7 times the production of large-scale agriculture. In
the recreation of pre-Inca agriculture in the altiplano of
Bolivia and Peru, the production went from two and a half
tons per hectare to forty tons per hectare in five years,
and it is an agriculture that requires very little work.
It's possible to do really healthy agriculture that's more
productive than green revolution agriculture, and far, far
more energy efficient and far, far less destructive.

So
that is a place, agriculture, where our technology has been
used totally inappropriately and purely for the sake of
profits for a handful of people. It's inhuman to perpetrate
that kind of agriculture in the face of the starvation it
brings.

On the other hand, our communications
technology is vital, so that we can connect self-sufficient
living communities with each other into a global web. So I
think this is where we integrate native techniques and
modern technology -- that we have the have the
communications system to share the way we work at the local
level in the bioregions working in healthy, organic
community.

London: Journalists often talk about
positive changes like recycling, solar energy, or organic
farming as if these are passing fads, the whims of a small
minority of people at the fringes of our culture.

Sahtouris: There is nothing more fundamental than
food and air and water. If people are demonstrating that
food can be produced not only more efficiently, more
healthfully, less destructively, but also cheaper, in
organic ways, that is only going to be labeled a
"fad" by those whose interests it opposes. It
will never be labeled a fad by those who get to eat the
food produced in that way.

It's the same as writing the
idea of Gaia off as "just" a metaphor, when all
science is based on metaphor. Food production is done
either in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. We know now
that there are huge interests at stake in producing food in
unhealthy ways. Our television sets now tell us that one
third of the chickens in Los Angeles are contaminated and
yet people continue to walk away from the television set
and buy them. They don't realize that the supermarket food
which is often so contaminated, is often much more
expensive to produce than organic food. But it's subsidized
by the government. Again, we are not taking on the
responsibility of democracy. We are not saying, Why is the
government subsidizing the production of unhealthy food
when it could be subsidizing organic farmers and keeping us
healthy? Why can't Clinton change the health system? What
is going on in Washington?

London: In closing,
tell me something about what you are working on at the
moment.

Sahtouris: I'm trying to help the five
indigenous groups I work with in the Andes to develop a
cultural center that will revive and promote Andean culture
with its wonderful agriculture -- the most intensive and
productive experiments in history were done in the Andes,
and over half the food eaten in the world today traces back
to the Andes. Their music is very healthy and alive and
good for people. Their natural-dyed weavings and arts, the
wisdom of their elders, their language, these are all
things we are trying to preserve. I think that the world at
large would benefit very much from learning about them. The
Incas social organization was a kind of paternalistic
welfare state that guaranteed food and housing and jobs and
didn't overwork people. There are some positive things we
can learn from that.

So I'm trying to help to promote
this ancient culture to the world at large as well as
preserve and protect it for its own descendants in the
Andes. I think the Andes are a very important place in the
world, spiritually and physically. Many Tibetan lamas are
coming there saying that there is a shift in energy from
the Himalayas to the Andes. We hope that is true and that
great lessons can be learned from that source.

I'm also
working on some music festivals to try to connect Andean
music with other parts of the world. I'm beginning to work
on the Internet. I'm interested in cyberfests and ways of
having people exchange information, music, and other
aspects of culture around the globe as rapidly as possible
toward transformation. The Internet itself is a giant
self-organizing living system that is a bit chaotic at
present but has the potential for being the first real
democracy in the world, for example.

So those are a few
of my interests. I keep writing and traveling and working
in those areas.

London: It's been a pleasure
talking with you. Thank you.

Sahtouris: Thanks,
Scott.

This interview was adapted from the radio series
Insight
& Outlook, hosted by Scott London. A translation of the
interview appeared in the February 1999 issue of Thot, a
Brazilian journal. Copyright 1996 by Scott London. All
rights reserved.